Muse Margaret called in the evening - she finished the book and really liked it, but had some real problems with the fifty or sixty pages that have to do with the label. I'd already tried to remove as much of what I thought she wouldn't like, but there were still sections that really bothered her. I was afraid it was going to be a huge amount of fixing, but when we finally talked through everything, and I'm here to tell you we went page by page through that section, it really turned out to be doing major adjustments to four pages in a row, and the rest was really minor stuff - removing a line here, rephrasing something there - on about six other pages. And it's so much better now. I just couldn't see it, but she's just a reader, but a reader who knows me and knows the story that I'm trying to tell. Those changes are all for the better and make things cleaner and clearer and also don't get me into that place of editorializing rather than just stating. That's a lot of what wasn't working for her and it was not hard to adjust it.
Other than that, it was two minor little things on earlier stuff, and, interestingly, the final line of the final chapter before the Outroduction begins. I wasn't sold on the line, although I thought it was fun. But she was adamant that it didn't sound like me. So, in the end I just removed the line and the chapter now ends with the final line of the previous paragraph, which, when I saw it that way, made much more sense to me. And she loved the outroduction and its last line. So, her part of this is now done.
